Bio 2A03, as you can see from my ratings is one of those courses. You register for it, it seems supremely interesting, you're all hyped up to go, and then the course turns out to be the worst thing since food at Commons.

There are 3 tests for 32%, 5 labs for 24% (3 Formal -...

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How mandatory is the textbook for this course?

Originally Posted by SKleiboer11

How mandatory is the textbook for this course?

you need it for one of the labs for sure, and it really helps when you miss classes and need to catch up because it's so straight forward

That being said, the 3rd edition should be sufficient because it's exactly the same as the 4th, which came out last year, so don't feel the need to buy the latest one and save some money!

Any recent reviews?

Prof: Dr. Scott
30% : 2 Tests
30% : Labs (2 partial lab reports, 5% each; 2 full lab reports, 10% each)
40% : Exam

This course was basically a review of grade 11 and 12 biology concepts regarding the human body with a few new concepts added here and there. Topics include neurophysiology, endocrinology, muscles, cardiovascular, respiratory, blood, renal, GI, and reproduction. I didn't really like the course, I found it really boring and it was difficult to motivate myself to study. Did not really need to go to lectures as his slides had the important information. Occasionally he would have blank slides that need to be filled out but he only ever ended up testing a single topic of the various ones.

Dr. Scott was kind of a "meh" teacher. Although he wasn't really reading off his slides, the information that he spoke orally was all written on the slides so you didn't really need to pay attention or go to lecture or panic if you missed lectures. I found some of his explanations to be somewhat clear but probably not the best explanations. One problem that I had was that sometimes he would ask the class a question and when someone answered, he wouldn't repeat the answer so that the rest of the class could hear so everyone was always scrambling for the answer because no one heard it.

Most of the material tested was from the slides in medium-deep detail. It was pretty much all memorizing. There were a few application questions here and there but the majority of the questions were factual "either you know it or not" questions (always MC). Averages for the tests were usually around mid to high 70s.

Lab were not as hard as some people said they were but I guess it also depends on how picky your TA is. The TAs will always tell you mid-lab what they're looking for in the lab report and all the figures and tables and important information that they want included as well as formatting.

Textbook is essential. Not the best written textbook out there. It was Principles of Human Physiology by Cindy Stanfield. I found that a lot of the important parts were very brief and not detailed enough. For these parts I used another random anatomy/physiology textbook that I found on the internet.

Overall, I didn't really enjoy the course. It was like a brief introduction to the human body with little to no application and mostly just rememorizing stuff you learned from high school that you had forgotten which felt like such a chore.

Agree with previous poster mostly. All of it was memorization, so if you/re good at that then you'll do great on tests. The reason this course was on the hard side was becuase of the lab reports which I hated. They taught me a lot and helped me come out of the course better at writing reports, but it was brutal. The questions you had to answer in the discussion sections were mostly not even in the course, you had to research. Most questions were so hard to even find articles answering them, and if you did then sometimes I had articles contradicting each other (for example, 1 question was if thinking affected breathing patterns, 1 article i found said yes, other no, I wrote no as it was easier to understand the second article, I was lucky and my TA marked it as right, however my professor said thinking can affect breathing when I asked him after the reports came out, which is seriously confusing...).

The first report was just a results section, really easy, but TAs randomly marked things wrong that they didn't specify they were looking for, frustrating, however once you correct all the little things in your future reports, you don't loose marks again and its better. The second report was results and discussion, almost a full lab report. Last 2 were full lab reports, 12-14 pages long altogether was what I had for them. Brutal, I spent 2 or 3 days in a row finishing each of those, doing nothing else! IF you can, find upper years and read their past full lab reports just to understand what structure and depth they're looking for, I think that would have helped me a lot.

Don't take this unless you have to. The course content, tests, and exam were interesting and totally manageable but the labs were horrid. I ended with a great mark, but I can't imagine feeling happy if I had taken this as an elective. Recommend BIO 2D03 or 2C03, imo they were more enjoyable and the lab/tutorial reports/assignments were much less crazy.